The Fog of Unknowing How perpetual ignorance shapes the never-ending war on terrorView original

By Ali Gharib

August 23, 2016

Between
the end of the administration of George W. Bush and the candidacy of
Donald Trump, we have allowed ourselves to think too little about the
role of ignorance in American political life. Already, the most infamous
comment on varying states of enlightenment—Donald Rumsfeld’s
meditation on “known unknowns”—reads like a period piece, a set of
remarks one could never imagine issuing from an Obama official. Ignorance
was a feature, not a bug, of the war on terror, one that allowed Bush
apparatchiks to drastically expand executive power and to evade the
often disastrous consequences of their actions. But while the Bush years
brought the most obvious missteps, from the Iraq War to waterboarding,
Obama has continued to wage war from a position of not knowing—or, at
least, of not knowing enough.

This persistent ignorance is the theme of Mark Danner’s new book, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War.
An acclaimed journalist and professor, Danner has reported from Iraq,
the Balkans, and Haiti; in 2009, he obtained a copy of the International
Committee of the Red Cross report on torture at CIA “black sites.”
Unlike other recent books on the subject—by New York Times investigative journalist Charlie Savage and New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright—Spiral
offers few new facts. But all three books tell a story about how the
war on terror has remained tragically mired in what Rumsfeld called the
“unknown unknowns.” As the war has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan,
from extraordinary rendition to drone strikes, America has failed to
come up with an endgame.
Our bureaucrats and operatives, every step of the way, have sought new
tools and bent laws to combat the threat of terrorism, yet have lagged
just behind real time and made little progress.

Spiral
focuses on the “state of exception,” the period after the attacks of
September 11 when civil liberties were systematically rolled back. Most
states of emergency and constitutional dictatorships eventually end, but
the war on terror, as the book’s subtitle suggests, rolls on with a
seemingly unstoppable inertia. The book is divided into two sections:
one on the state of exception as enacted under Bush, and a second on its
continuation under Barack Obama. It also offers a telling glimpse of
what is to come. The next president, after all, is unlikely to end the
war. And the threat the war seeks to remove—jihadi terrorism—continues
to grow, as evidenced by recent headlines about Iraq and the spate of “lone wolf” attacks at home.

Ultimately a polemic, Spiral
is at its strongest when taking on the Bush administration’s worst
excesses: the unwarranted secrecy and boneheaded assumptions that led to
disaster. Danner draws evidence from the rich histories of the era,
deftly repurposing the words of former administration officials, many of
them still loyal to the president they served. These accounts—memoirs
and speeches by the likes of Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick
Cheney—constitute a uniquely and unintentionally revealing genre: Call
them the Unknowing Knowers. By artfully running down their frequent
lies, their confident declarations of truth that turned out to be
abysmally wrong, and their post-hoc justifications for their mistakes,
Danner constructs a terrifyingly clear picture of the distorted logic of
the Bush administration.

Take the case of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, the young Saudi-born Palestinian better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Zubaydah, whose story runs through the first half of Spiral.
Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in the months after the September 11
attacks and declared “a trophy in the war on terror” by no less than
President Bush. Rumsfeld called him a “close associate” of Osama bin
Laden, boasting that he was “if not the number two, very close to the
number two person” in Al Qaeda. For good measure, Rumsfeld added: “I
think that’s well established.” Well established in statements made by
administration officials, perhaps, but not by the facts. In reality,
Zubaydah’s role in Al Qaeda was vastly overstated.
Though a mujahideen—a veteran of the Afghan civil war who worked at a
jihadi training camp—he wasn’t involved in planning September 11 or
subsequent attacks on the United States.

After the FBI took
Zubaydah into custody, he initially provided his interrogators with
limited but accurate intelligence about Al Qaeda. Then the CIA realized
who he was, and decided to torture him. Zubaydah suffered strain
positions, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, and 83 rounds of the
painful and frightening simulated drowning known as waterboarding. The
ordeal, in which Zubaydah lost an eye, exemplifies many of Danner’s
central themes—the war on terror’s brutality, the counter-productiveness
of its methods, and above all, the pervasive ignorance that led to its
failures. If the Bush administration believed its own assertions about
Zubaydah’s importance, he must by definition know more than he was
letting on. Thus Zubaydah’s own ignorance, and the CIA’s ignorance of
his ignorance, became a justification for his prolonged torture.

Bush’s
war on terror was rife with these circular justifications. Policies
were said to be born of necessities that turned out to not exist; the
radical expansion of executive authority and illegal use of torture were
based, in turn, on those unfounded policies. The failure to prevent the
largest terrorist attack in American history, so the reasoning went,
must have occurred not because officials improperly utilized the tools
in place to guard against such an attack, but because they needed
larger, more powerful tools. Danner rightly sees this not only as a
tactical shift, but as a bit of ass-covering and, moreover, a political
maneuver:

After declaring the war on
terror, they could ascribe the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks mostly
to the previous administration, to its methods: as if the imposition of
the state of exception, and the claim that the struggle to protect
Americans from terrorists was in fact a “war on terror,” marked a bright
line between Republican and Democratic administrations.

As
the second half of Danner’s book demonstrates, when Obama came to power
and waged his own war on terror, that line dimmed drastically. There
would be no return to a law enforcement paradigm for combating
terrorism.

While Danner acknowledges that many of Obama’s
failings are rooted in Bush’s policies, because that is where the new
president was forced to seed them, he largely overlooks the political
realities Obama has faced, including a hostile Congress that has blocked
any effort to close
Guantanamo. He also pays too little attention to Obama’s attempts to
end large military engagements and his decision not to wade into the
thick of the Syrian civil war. But like other liberal critics of Obama—such as David Bromwich,
who casts Obama’s whole presidency as “a large lost chance”—Danner is
deeply disappointed in the president’s choices in the situations where
he has had the authority to act on his own. Obama ordered that the
United States would no longer torture, for instance, but failed to bring
to justice those who perpetrated torture under Bush. He escalated the
war in Afghanistan—now the longest official war in American history—and
failed to halt the conflict when the escalation proved fruitless. Late
in his presidency, he has lamented that extremism will not be defeated
by force alone, but he has failed to find an alternative to the
borderless shadow war of covert missile strikes and special forces raids
that he greatly expanded.

This shadow war,
too, is waged in ignorance. Who are the people we are attacking with
missiles fired from drones? We don’t always know. Sometimes they merely
match a “signature” of terrorist-like activities. Who have we actually
killed with those bombs? We’re just not sure. The government’s calculus
for determining enemy combatants comes damned close to stating that if
they died, they must be terrorists. A legal framework now exists for
assassinating American citizen terrorists abroad. The boundaries of the
shadow war, over both space and time, are seemingly permanent known
unknowns.

This legacy of perpetual
ignorance will live on in the next administration. Both Hillary Clinton
and Donald Trump are likely to expand the war on terror in their own
ways. Clinton’s record as a senator, secretary of state, and
presidential candidate shows her to be willing to rely heavily on the
overt military means
by which conflict is waged. A fierce advocate of the disastrous
intervention in Libya, she pressed inside the administration for a more
forceful response to the Syria crisis. During her candidacy, she has
called for the imposition of a no-fly zone over part of the country, a
tack the Pentagon and defense analysts alike warn would represent a
significant escalation and require tremendous resources, including tens
of thousands of troops. Despite Trump’s claim that he opposed the Iraq
War—though he in fact endorsed the effort before it was underway—he has
promised not a slight escalation of Obama’s war on terror, but a full-on
reversion to the greatest excesses
of the Bush years. “I would bring back waterboarding,” he declared from
a GOP debate stage in February. “And I would bring back a hell of a lot
worse than waterboarding.” The fact that Trump went on, after that
declaration, to win the Republican nomination speaks to one of Obama’s
greatest failings: He did not ensure that the precedents he set, either
by action or inaction, put an end to the brutal and ineffective tactics
of the war on terror.

Indeed, Obama not only continued many of Bush’s policies, he opted to root them in legislation and oversight by the courts. In Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency,
Savage chronicles this course in meticulous detail. He lays out the
argument that Obama is not a civil libertarian, but rather a purveyor of
the rule of law. Where a civil libertarian might balk at assassinating
Americans abroad without a trial, a president chiefly concerned with the
rule of law seeks to ground the tactic in lengthy and, he hopes, sound
legal opinions. The distinction is subtle, but it explains the
fundamental paradoxes of Obama’s policies in the war on terror. While
making cosmetic reforms amid a public debate, he preserved much of the
surveillance state’s power; he sought (and failed) to find a specific
legal underpinning for the shadow war; and he codified policies that
paved the way for permanent, indefinite detention. Even under Savage’s
illuminating construct, however, it is hard to fathom how a rule-of-law
president could allow blatant violators of law at the highest levels of
government—the authors of Bush’s torture policies—to go unpunished.

Though
Savage doesn’t explicitly point to ignorance as a cause of the
continuing failures of Obama’s approach, it is apparent in his
reporting. He pinpoints the attempted bombing
of an American airliner on Christmas Day, 2009—“a stomach- churning
near miss”—as a turning point. It was the fear of unknown future attacks
that motivated Obama to continue and even extend many Bush policies,
involving an overarching reliance on state secrets in court and an
escalated campaign to ferret out government sources who give information
to the press. Obama’s attack on leakers represents, at its core, a
full-throated endorsement of the essential underpinning of Bush’s
policies: the need to keep the American public in ignorance.

The government, however, wasn’t the only force keeping citizens in the dark: Sometimes journalists did it themselves. In The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State,
Pulitzer Prize—winner Lawrence Wright offers a window into one such
incident—a small blip, to be sure, but a shocking one nonetheless. The
book is composed of stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker,
some of which have since been expanded and revised. In the prologue,
Wright reveals that he censored himself at the behest of one of his
subjects, recalling the editing process of his 2008 profile of Mike McConnell, a Navy admiral turned director of national intelligence:

During
the course of one of our interviews, McConnell told me that he had been
“tortured.” He meant that while he was undergoing survival training in
the navy, he had been subjected to physical abuse that was supposed to
prepare him to deal with the possibility of being held captive. Later,
while the article was being fact-checked, McConnell denied that he had
made such a statement. When I reminded him that the interview had been
taped, he begged me to drop that statement because he said it would cost
him his job. It wasn’t my goal to have McConnell fired, and he had been
unusually generous in granting me access. But I did wonder if I made a
mistake in omitting that portion of the conversation from the New Yorker
profile that followed, since I believe it was pertinent to the national
conversation we were having about torture at the time. McConnell is now
retired from government, and I’ve restored his remarks.

With
the possibility of a Trump presidency looming, “pertinent at the time”
seems like a vast understatement. Torture remains a hotly debated, if
partisan, tactic in the war on terror, with Trump’s successful primary
bid demonstrating that an avowedly pro-torture position can win out.
Having a high-ranking government official speak of “enhanced
interrogation techniques” as “torture”—something the Bush administration
assiduously avoided—might not have altered our current state of
affairs. But if McConnell had been fired for using
the word, it would have stood as a powerful point in the debate. The
only government official held accountable for torture would have been
one who called it by its name.

Wright’s stories span both
the Bush and Obama administrations—everything from Al Qaeda’s origins to
the war against the Islamic State. Although his subjects often
exemplify the courage of exceptional individuals, they unwittingly
underscore the failures of our institutions. Yes, heroes abound in The Terror Years. There is Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who opposed torture, and a shadowy figure known as Dr. Fadl,
an Islamist thinker who helped shape Al Qaeda but came to question
terrorism. But few, if any, of their stories end with victories. In the
book’s closing chapter, Wright chronicles the efforts of David Bradley,
publisher and philanthropist, to help recover hostages taken by the
Islamic State. But the U.S. government, in its stubbornness, becomes an
obstacle to rescuing victims of terror: In the end, four of the five aid
workers and journalists whom Bradley was trying to rescue are executed.

We
are still in the “Terror Years,” as Wright has rendered it in his
title, and we will be for the foreseeable future. In 2014, according to
government estimates cited by Danner, 32,727 people died worldwide in
terrorist attacks. In 2010, that number was 13,186. In 2002, it was 725.
What allows us to continue a war that has so transparently failed? For
one, the burden of terrorism has shifted elsewhere: Even as the
international body count spirals out of control, few Americans have died
at terrorists’ hands since September 11. Of the 32,727 victims in 2014,
for example, only 24 were Americans, none of whom were killed on
American soil. In June, the same month when 49 Americans were killed in
Orlando in an act of terror, at least 55 people died in suicide bombings
in and around Baghdad. On a single day in May, at least 80 people in
the Iraqi capital died in four separate bombings.

Danner points
again and again to a memo issued by Rumsfeld on October 16, 2003, with
the subject line: “Global War on Terrorism.” In it, Rumsfeld speaks of
our lack of “metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war
on terror,” and asks, “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and
dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical
clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?” Thirteen
years later, the answer seems obvious: no. There are, as Rumsfeld
himself once put it, at least a few “things we know we know.”

Ali Gharib is a contributor to The Nation. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Intercept, Brooklyn Magazine, Washington Monthly, the Columbia Journalism Review and other outlets. Follow him on Twitter at @ali_gharib